I do not have to travel far to find interesting stories from the Sacramento Real Estate market–which I write about here, so you will have another tool to discern the truth from water cooler gossip. And knowledge is power. And you need a little muscle these days!

I spoke with a seller about two months ago, about doing a short sale on their red hot Elk Grove listing potential. Their general attitude, sadly, was “nah….we’re just going to let the bank have it”. I tried to discourage them of course, I’ve never seen that as a good plan-hurts your credit big time, for starters.

Today, I thought I’d follow up, check one more time. But, sadly, too late. Bank foreclosed, house was sold at the Trustee Sale on the courthouse steps to a third party, a new owner, for $20,000 more than was owed on the house!! The money goes back to the lien holder.

Or to put it another way…..the seller (the original owner who was foreclosed on) had $20,000 in equity.

Or, to put it another way….the seller by being obstinate and “letting the bank have it”, just gave the bank $20,000 of his money, that he would have gotten from the sale of the home. In his pocket. In his bank account. Pay down other debt. Go to Hawaii. Gone. Gone to the foreclosing bank.

Don’t let your home foreclose. Sacramento Real Estate is the number 2 market in the nation for recovering values. We have gone from 65% Short Sales to only 10%.

What’s your Sacramento home value (or anywhere in the area Elk Grove, Roseville, Rocklin, Folsom, etc)?  Let me know if you want a free property valuation.

Please note I use single family residences-homes, condos and that includes homes on acreage. It doesn’t include mobile homes, empty lots, more than 1 home on a lot, nor duplexes, triplexes, etc.

Inventory is increasing, which indicates that the feeding frenzy of buyers is going to be fed. A simple equation of supply catching up with demand.  While it is still a seller’s market, the time to sell a home in the Sacramento area is ripe, right now.

I’ve heard it several times in the last ten days-”we’re going to wait to see how the market does’. Well, if inventory goes up, and demand slows, that makes your well valued home look the same in May as it does in April. Question is, what are you waiting for? Seems like gambling with equity to me. If you need to sell, let’s list it now, while you still have the demand. Just sayin’….

Use this as a source of information, a way to look at the Sacramento Real Estate market in a snapshot:

Number Of Listings-

Jan. 2013     1192

Feb. 2013     1227

Mar. 2013     1370

As of April 20th, 2013–1787 listings

Inventory is on the way up!  Good, good news for frustrated buyers!

Of the April 10th Active listings–

106 are Short Sales

156 are Foreclosures.

There are more than 1500 Short Sales in contract, waiting for approval from the lien holder.

Sacramento Real Estate has gone from 65% short sale listings to 10%! And the same for Foreclosures, +/- a few points. What a turn around! One of the top in the nation!

Thinking about selling? Give me call. My valuation services are free and no obligation.

It’s another great month in Real Estate!

If you hire a Realtor who is willing to discount their payday (i.e.–the commission),  how much will you wind up discounting YOUR payday (final net income to you from the sale of your home)?  I work hard for my clients–getting a home in the appropriate contract to protect my sellers is not a push button process. Getting an escrow closed with minimal bumps is not on autopilot. Every escrow is difficult these days, despite the higher demand than supply. Money is funny with these lenders and every escrow is bumpy.  I work hard, have self-respect and look forward to your closing!

If a discount Realtor has so little self respect to discount his/her payday-just to get your listing, how much respect will they have for your payday???  How much will they “discount” their work to match their pay? Less hours working for you, less attentiveness to detail, less personal service. Why would a Realtor working for less go back and forth with a buyer’s agent, negotiating the best transaction for you, the seller, when they are getting paid less?

Remember that commission is split between agents, and then split with each of our brokers. The brokers take fees out of the agent’s pay. No single agent is walking away with “your” money, so why hire someone who discounts the commission, will settle for drastically less pay, just to say they listed your home? How much drastically less sales price is that going to cost you in the long run? More than the reduced commission, I promise you.

Good luck out there! Call me if you need to sell your home, I look forward to hearing from you!

Please note I use single family residences-homes, condos and that includes homes on acreage. It doesn’t include mobile homes, empty lots, more than 1 home on a lot, nor duplexes, triplexes, etc.

Inventory is increasing, which indicates that the feeding frenzy of buyers is going to be fed. A simple equation of supply catching up with demand.  While it is still a seller’s market, the time to sell a home in the Sacramento area is ripe, right now.

I’ve heard it several times in the last ten days-”we’re going to wait to see how the market does’. Well, if inventory goes up, and demand slows, that makes your well valued home look the same in May as it does in April. Question is, what are you waiting for? Seems like gambling with equity to me. If you need to sell, let’s list it now, while you still have the demand. Just sayin’….

Use this as a source of information, a way to look at the Sacramento Real Estate market in a snapshot:

Number Of Listings-

Jan. 2013     1192

Feb. 2013     1227

Mar. 2013     1370

As of April 20th, 2013–1787 listings

Inventory is on the way up!  Good, good news for frustrated buyers!

Of the April 10th Active listings–

106 are Short Sales

156 are Foreclosures.

There are more than 1500 Short Sales in contract, waiting for approval from the lien holder.

Sacramento Real Estate has gone from 65% short sale listings to 10%! And the same for Foreclosures, +/- a few points. What a turn around! One of the top in the nation!

Thinking about selling? Give me call. My valuation services are free and no obligation.

It’s another great month in Real Estate!

Easy but shocking time for home sellers. I know sellers who had to wait a day and digest all the offers they received. And maybe the best news, Short Sales are slowly going away as equity returns. That’s a good day in Real Estate.

Values flying upwards in some areas-Elk Grove is strong for value growth, steady but slow climb in others. Who needs to sell a home in Sacramento!? Call me!

It doesn’t happen often, but lenders technically can tap deposit accounts to make up loan payments.

Borrowers who’ve missed a mortgage loan payment to a bank or credit union where they also have a checking or savings account might want to move their money. The right is rarely exercised, but these institutions technically can tap those accounts to get late payments and more, according to Jeffrey A. Schreiber of The Schreiber Law Firm in Marion, Ind.

“You may want to think twice, if you get into financial problems, about keeping your money in the same bank that you owe money to on any kind of loan,” Schreiber says.

The bank’s right to use a borrower’s deposit account to make up past-due payments is known as the “right of offset,”….

The one caveat is the bank must own the loan your home mortgage is in, and not just be a service provider. Lots of loans are sold to an investor, like, Fannie Mae, but serviced by Bank of America (for example). So in this case, B of A could not ‘tap’ your deposit account.

Read the full article here–http://www.bankrate.com/finance/mortgages/lenders-can-tap-bank-account-for-mortgage-1.aspx

Hopefully with the busy and inventory lean Sacramento Real Estate market, it is an indication that residents aren’t in as much trouble and won ‘t face this rarely used, but still scary right of the bank!

From the Huffington Post–

According to a report issued this week by Realtor.com, real estate in Northern California is booming — especially in one housing market that was among the hardest hit of any in the country by the collapse of the housing bubble.

The report, which looked at the year-over-year increases in median home listing prices in housing markets across the United States, found that the Sacramento area had the largest gains of any metro region. This data suggests that sagging housing prices, which have been a drag on the economy in much of California’s Central Valley for years, are not only beginning to rebound, but are doing so with surprising strength.

Five of the top 10 cities with the fastest growth are located in Northern California and two more are in the southern portion of the state.

“In Sacramento, you have a desirable area that was hit really hard by the housing bubble, with a lot of foreclosures and a lot of overbuilding,” said Alison Schwartz of Move, Inc., the operator of Realtor.com, who noted that the spike in prices in the area is largely a result of how far home values had dropped in the region during the recession.

During much of the 2000s, loose financing led to an oversupply of housing being built in the San Francisco Bay Area’s far outlying suburbs in the run-up to the crash. Since then, there’s been little new construction; so as demand naturally increases with the gradually improving economy, supply hasn’t been able to keep up and prices have jumped.

Additionally, many homeowners in the region still underwater on their mortgages, making it impossible for them to sell and further drying up some of the liquidity that would otherwise be present in the market.

Schwartz explained that it isn’t exclusively people re-entering the housing market after the recession or, for that matter, first-time home buyers who are driving this new demand. “A lot of investors are looking to buy cheap properties that are relatively undervalued at the moment because they were built at the wrong time.”

Not only did Sacramento have the biggest gain in home list prices over the course of the past year, but it also had the largest percentage of its listed houses go off the market, an inventory reduction of just over two-thirds. Even so, Sacramento’s median listing price is still well below its mid-bubble 2006 peak.

The Stockton-Lodi area, which was hit just as hard by the housing bubble, saw similarly staggering inventory reductions.

Housing prices gains can’t come soon enough for many homeowners in the region, which has been wracked by foreclosures and a flood of underwater mortgages.

“There are certain subdivisions in … [the Central Valley area] where one out of every two or three houses are in foreclosure,” Ruben Villalobos, an attorney and school board member in the nearby city of Modesto, told The Huffington Post in an interview last year.

Many of the other Northern California cities sitting atop the list owe their rapid price increases to a fairly different set of factors than those underlying Sacramento’s swift ascent. Places like Santa Barbara, San Francisco and San Jose largely retained their value during the recession and owe the continued strength of their real estate markets to their booming economies where high-income people want to live.

While San Francisco only had the third-highest jump in housing prices over the past year, the report found that the City by the Bay had, far and away, the highest median home sale price in the country of $749,000 — about double the median price of buying a home in New York City.

(Scary Alfred Hitchcock type music—-) Showing an empty house with the alarm system turned on!!!!  Arrrrgh!!!

What if the numbers code to turn it off is wrong? What if I can’t find the key pad in the house!? What if the alarm goes off and the police show up!?   It makes me really nervous!!!

Now, in the era of Marty McFly is Back From The Future, and the really cool things the Jetsons had to play with, being part of our life—alarm systems and more are starting to be operated off of IPADS and more. I think this makes me  nervous!

From the Sacramento Bee–

‘…… a homeowner might forget to set the alarm before leaving the house. Or maybe the alarm is set, but Grandma and Grandpa are coming over and don’t know the password to turn it off.

Now that person can pull out a smartphone or tablet, connect to the alarm system through a secure digital portal, and operate the security network as if at home punching numbers on the alarm box. The systems work with Android- or Apple-based mobile devices, alarm companies say.

Customers of advanced systems also can lock and unlock doors in their homes, as well as perform numerous other tasks.

“Advanced  let you control lights, thermostats, small appliances,” said Sarah Cohn, a spokeswoman for Florida-based ADT. “We continue to add capabilities to our platform. You can look in on your home at any time. You can get text and email notifications….’

And now, I have to wonder…..what if Mr. and Mrs. Seller forget to unalarm the home, and I go in with my buyer and arrrgh….set off the alarm!??!

Read more here

Trendgraphix reports 1249 homes and condos on the market in January, 2013.

Today, I checked the Metrolist and in Sacramento County, homes and condos number only 1187 Active (available) properties!!!  All those exclamation points because that is a drastically LOW number. No wonder home sellers are having a hey-day! (or is that HAY day, for my horse friends?)

What a great time to sell a home!

Compared 1187 available properties to 2632 avails a year ago, and 6695 in January 2009–when sellers were begging for a buyer to come knocking.

Of today’s available homes (1187), only 138 are Short Sales. Of ”Pending Homes” (homes in contract, there are 3836 of those), only 1767 are “Pending Short Lender Approval”, and 2069 of them are regular/equity pending sales–indicating a real turn in our Sacramento home sales and market–we are less than half of all homes being sold as short sales in Sacramento. The return of equity.

Need or want to sell? I am here, and I am an expert.  Contact me via email or phone, and I will help you navigate the wild ride!